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Improv, Week 4

Time is drawing nigh…

We have two more practices left before the performance.

Last night’s practice actually went pretty well. We played Audition, Forward Reverse, 185, What Are You Doing?, and Slide Show. I’ve played them all before, but before last night, Forward Reverse was a game I hated. The way they play it around here, though, takes away the part I hated, so it becomes totally fine!

Let me ‘splain: With Forward Reverse, you start a scene. When the ref/MC/whoever yells “Reverse!” you have to go backwards through the scene – not speaking backwards, but delivering lines in reverse order. The reason I’ve hated this game for years is that I’ve always had to play it where sometimes the scene would go in reverse past the point it had started, so we’d have to come up with stuff that led up to the stuff we did. Sound hard? It is. But with this group, they don’t do that as a general rule. They stick to what we’ve already seen and it makes it sooooooooo much easier. I actually thoroughly enjoyed playing it.

Improv is kind of like blogging for me. It’s one of those things I love to do just because it’s fun to do, but it’s so much more fun when someone notices and, hey, maybe enjoys it a little.

Next week we’ll actually do run-throughs of the show, which is as close to a dress rehearsal as you can get with improv. Basically it means we’ll go through the games we’re going to play in the order that we’ll play them. We obviously have no idea what the audience will suggest, so that remains the wrench that will be thrown in the works. We’ll also do a practice or two on the actual stage so we can get a feel for it.

We asked him (our teacher guy) last night if we could video tape the performance, and he said he’ll have to check into that. He doesn’t want to set any precedents. So if I can, I’ll get some clips up here, but I have no idea if that’ll happen, so don’t bet your farm on it.

The funny thing is, they’ll be advertising the show as if it’s a regular show, not a “this is a new class” show. We will be having three members of the actual troupe involved in the show, so that should be interesting and maybe make it worthwhile for the people who are paying $4 to get in.